Game Changing ITOA Use Cases

Keep Your Enterprise Safe from BYOD

By Raviv Chalamish Vice President of Products, AternityMobile devices and apps are transforming the face of enterprise computing. Current systems and processes can't keep up with the complexity involved in managing today's mobility requirements, especially with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives. A recent survey of more than 100 C-level IT executives and managers showed that 50 percent of respondents are not yet equipped to manage the IT accountability and security issues involved with mobile apps and devices in the workplace. The urgency to solve these problems is only increasing, as more enterprise employees rely on mobile devices for their work. The same survey showed that 37 percent of employees use their mobile devices for business activities for more than 60 minutes a day.

Mobility is more than an issue for employee convenience and satisfaction. As discussed in Accenture's Mobility Insights Report 2014, C-level executives around the world view mobility as a strategic enabler, rather than just another technology rollout. These executives expect their mobile initiatives to help them drive up revenue, launch new services, and keep up with customer demands.

With this kind of visibility, the pressure on IT to support these business goals through ITOA couldn't be higher. Both service assurance and device management become increasingly complex in a mobile environment, due to the variety of devices and operating systems, and the dependency of application performance on the wireless network. ITOA tools must deliver the actionable analytics that enable IT to understand the mobile experience of their users and better serve them.

Enterprise Mobility and BYOD Benefit from End User Visibility
Leading enterprises have adopted ITOA to manage mobility and BYOD, as well as to extract business data from mobile End User Experience. IT Operations can better manage its BYOD and mobility initiatives with a single pane of glass view of the most relevant ITOA KPIs, such as mobile app performance, crashes, dynamic alerts and reporting on mobile user experience. Key to success is recognizing the importance of managing what the end user experiences, since a one-dimensional view – of only mobile device performance, or only of the mobile app performance – is insufficient.

IT Operations needs visibility into the End User Experience of mobile apps in order to rapidly isolate and resolve problems. When issues occur for one user, they need to determine whether or not other users have the same issues. To trouble shoot, they need to identify any common geographic or infrastructure patterns among those impacted.

As mobile apps are deployed, IT needs to provide feedback to developers about how app performance is impacted by device and network characteristics. For example, if the app requires too much memory or drains the battery, it will be of limited value.

Real-world Use Case
A global telecom provider needed to ensure the seamless transition of its in-store customer check-in process from a traditional desktop app to an iPad-based app. The goals for this transition were to reduce customer wait time, deliver a more personalized shopping experience, and increase shoppers' overall satisfaction. However, the iPad rollout exposed them to new risks. Problems like weak Wi-Fi connection, rapid battery drain, app errors, and slow performance would interfere with achieving their goals. Even after the completion of the initial transition, frequent app updates and device OS upgrades would present the same challenges.

For each store, IT Operations has visibility into all KPIs for the network, the devices, and the app to proactively identify performance and productivity issues. Correlating problems across all three of these areas enables the Operations team to identify and resolve issues, before customer service is impacted.

Enterprise-wide, the Operations team can optimize those same metrics across the thousands of retail stores by associating performance and availability issues by geography, app version, device type and more. In this way, they can identify the impact of particular device versions, or carrier network performance on the customer check-in app.

For enterprises rolling out mobility to achieve strategic business goals, both aspects of ITOA are needed – the ability to dive deep into a specific issue to identify and fix the problem impacting End User Experience; and the need for an enterprise-wide view of overall app and device performance to proactively ensure users' satisfaction.

About Raviv ChalamishRaviv Chalamish is Vice President, Products at Aternity. He is a proven and innovative technology leader responsible for delivering breakthrough products and services to global customers. Chalamish has also served as VP in charge of Services and Pre-Sales at Aternity, gaining an intimate understanding of mission-critical business challenges and the complexities involved in dynamic IT enterprise environments. Prior to joining Aternity, Chalamish led the APM Subject Matter Experts team and the New England Pre-Sales team within Mercury (now HP Software). Chalamish was an officer in the Israeli Air Force and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University.